New York's attorney general is on the trail of a fake nun who dons a habit and cross to solicit donations for a phony church with a violent past, the Associated Press reports.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office said it issued subpoenas Monday in the case of Mindy LeGrand, 54, who was photographed by the New York Post on July 17 panhandling in Manhattan's Little Italy neighborhood. She then removed her habit and took the subway to Brooklyn.

According to the Post, the impostor told some donors that she was collecting money for an upstate New York orphanage and others that she was collecting "for the homeless." She said she was an Episcopal nun, but the Episcopal Church has never heard of her.

LeGrand actually is part of an unaccredited church that has operated at least since the 1970s, when founder Devernon LeGrand kept a stable of phony nuns who were sent out to beg. According to the Post, she is his daughter-in-law.

Devernon LeGrand and a son, Noconda LeGrand, were convicted in 1975 of raping a young woman in the four-story Brooklyn building that houses the LeGrand family and the church, then called St. John's Pentecostal Church of Our Lord.

The church founder was convicted in 1977 of murdering two teenage sisters in the same building to keep them from testifying in the rape case. He also was convicted of murdering his wife in 1970. He died in prison in 2006. Noconda LeGrand was released from prison in 1980 and runs the church now.